FAROO is a universal web search engine

Web search engine

A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results often referred to as SERPS, or "search engine results pages". The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other...

 based on peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...

 technology. It uses a distributed crawler

Distributed web crawling

Distributed web crawling is a distributed computing technique whereby Internet search engines employ many computers to index the Internet via web crawling. Such systems may allow for users to voluntarily offer their own computing and bandwidth resources towards crawling web pages...

 that stores search data on users' computers instead of a central server

Server (computing)

In the context of client-server architecture, a server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs, the "clients". Thus, the "server" performs some computational task on behalf of "clients"...

. Whenever a user visits a website, it is automatically indexed and distributed to the network. Ranking is done by comparing usage statistics of users, such as web pages visited, amount of time spent on each page, and whether the pages were bookmarked or printed.

Benefits

• FAROO takes user behavior into account when calculating a website's rank, resulting in more relevant search results than traditional search engines can provide.
• Because pages are automatically indexed upon being visited, updates to the index are nearly instant.
• No central servers are required, drastically reducing infrastructure costs and allowing the service to scale infinitely.
• FAROO plans to share up to 50 % of its advertising revenue with its users.

Drawbacks

• The index grows with the user base, so a small user base would result in a small index and therefore inaccurate results.
• The nature of the service could allow easy manipulation by spammers, although FAROO claims that their algorithms prevent this.